The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  They were brought to full spate over the next thirty years by the Australian wool industry and its insatiable appetite for land. They would go on far beyond the end of the penal system itself. Between 1800 and 1830, the settled stations pushed inexorably outward: south to Goulburn and the high Monaro plains, west across the Blue Mountains to the golden grasslands that stretched around Bathurst and Mudgee, and north to the valley of the Hunter River. At every contact with the Aborigines, the pattern would be much the same: a collision between a white culture of private property and a black one of “primitive communism” in which no resources, land least of all, were privately owned. Sometimes the blacks would move on. Usually they attacked, launching a small guerrilla war until enough of their warriors had been cut down by the settlers’ firearms to render the tribe helpless. If their resistance was strong enough, martial law could be declared against them: In 1824 the stockholders around Bathurst persuaded Governor Brisbane to send soldiers in to “pacify” the blacks in their area. Brisbane, who a few years before had been impressing missionaries with his liberal expressions of concern for the Aborigine (“If something is not done for these poor, distressed creatures, they will become extinct: the race of them will perish from absolute want!” he told a Wesleyan),82 dispatched his troopers and native police, and the death toll was not tallied.

  Until lately, historians have not paid enough attention to the fierceness with which Australian aboriginal clans fought the European invaders for possession of their land. “The other side of the frontier”—to use the title Henry Reynolds gave to his study of this subject—showed a pattern of tenacious and often well-organized resistance, ranging from massed frontal attacks through guerrilla warfare to the carefully plotted tracking and revenge-murder of individual Europeans for known crimes against tribespeople. The Aborigines’ tactical superiority was generally, if reluctantly, admitted by whites. Aborigines stole guns and learned how to use them; they made devastating attacks on sheep and cattle, harassed miners, killed horses and burned homesteads, thus undercutting the economic basis of many areas of white settlement.83

  This resistance did not always begin at once. Aborigines—at least in the early colonial years, before awareness of European rapacity became general among them—seemed to have no idea of dispossession. As Reynolds pointed out, “While conflict was ubiquitous in traditional societies, territorial conquest was virtually unknown.… If blacks often did not react to the initial invasion of their country it was because they were not aware it had taken place. They certainly did not believe that their land had suddenly ceased to belong to them and they to their land. The mere presence of Europeans, no matter how threatening, could not uproot certainties so deeply implanted in Aboriginal custom and consciousness.”84 Many tribes were convinced of the ignorance and weakness of the whites—at first. It was not the coming of the Europeans that provoked resistance, but their unrelenting seizure of all rights and uses of the land.

  In some districts the Aborigines’ resistance lasted as long as ten years, but they were fated not to win. European technology was against them, and so was the breakdown of their hunting environment caused by the introduction of stock. Pasturage altered the environment and began to obliterate the old material bases of aboriginal life. Sheep and cattle drove out kangaroos and other game. Fences blocked ancient routes and runs. The forests were cut back. Familiar plants died out. And always, everywhere on the expanding limits of settlement, the Aborigine was seen as a mere native pest, like a dingo or kangaroo. He was a myall, a murky, a boong or (in a phrase that precisely expressed the whites’ belief in his inevitable passing) a dark cloud. He could be killed without hesitation—and, given the remoteness of the outer settlements and the thinness and inherent racism of the police force, without much chance of detection and punishment. “They may be destroyed by their fellows, and what is worse, may be shot wholesale by Europeans, and yet the arm of the law has no power to punish unless the evidence of a white person can be procured.”85 One observer heard “a large proprietor of sheep and cattle” maintain “that there was no more harm in shooting a native, than in shooting a dog”; and another

  narrated, as a good thing, that he had been one of a party who had pursued the blacks, in consequence of cattle having been rushed by them, and he was sure they shot upwards of a hundred.… [H]e maintained that there was nothing wrong in it, that it was preposterous to suppose they had souls.86

  The death toll of this long frontier war is a matter of informed guesswork rather than hard fact. Probably between 2,000 and 2,500 European settlers were killed, and upwards of 20,000 Aborigines.87

  The emblematic massacre in New South Wales occurred in 1838 on the property of Henry Dangar, at a place called Myall Creek near the Gwydir River. It was meant as a reprisal for stock-theft and “cattle-rushing” or stampeding, which stockmen resented because it thinned the animals through panic and so reduced their salable weight.

  The station-hands had no idea who the actual culprits were, but they found an inoffensive encampment of Aborigines some forty miles from the site and attacked them. A dozen armed stockmen, led by a white who had kept company with the little tribe for the previous three weeks, rounded up twenty-eight unarmed men, women and children, roped them together, drove them to a killing-ground nearby, and slaughtered them all with muskets and cutlasses. Then they chopped some up and mutilated others, and burned the corpses on a pyre. But as it happened, there was a white witness among the killers who turned informer against the other eleven. Although the jury in their first trial acquitted them all, a second trial produced verdicts of guilty for seven of them, who were hanged; four went free. The case was politically explosive. Probably it would never have come to court at all had Governor George Gipps not intervened directly. As no treaties with the Aborigines existed, Gipps concluded that they “had never been in possession of any Code of Laws intelligible to a Civilized People,” but he maintained that “in putting the Law into Force against the Aborigines, the utmost degree of Mercy and forebearance should be exercised.” Settlers had exterminated thousands of Aborigines before, but none had swung for it. So acute was the resentment of this sentimental interference with the code of the frontier that some graziers, led by a magistrate, even raised a defense fund for the murderers. Although the Myall Creek massacre caused a passing revulsion of public conscience, it did nothing to stop the majority of those who believed the Australian version of Manifest Destiny—that “it is in the order of nature that, as civilization advances, savage nations must be exterminated” and that the safety of explorers and settlers should not “be sacrificed out of deference to … political and humbugging maniacs who write and prate of matters of which they knew nothing whatever.”88

  The best way to deal with the “sable brethren” was “by the discriminating application of firearms.” Ten days after Myall Creek (the news of which, however, had not yet leaked out), a correspondent in another Sydney paper, piqued by Gipps’s “softness” in not sending a punitive military force against the blacks in the Hunter Valley, urged that

  if, by one decisive step, the Aborigines are shown their own weakness, and convinced that it is useless for them to contend with Europeans, they will submit and cease their outrages, and much bloodshed may be spared.… [U]nless prompt measures are adopted, these dusky “lords of the soil” will fairly drive the pale faces from their territories.89

  The people who most craved this Final Solution were the convicts. It was not thought surprising that, of the twelve white murderers at Myall Creek, only one (the witness) was born in the colony and all the rest were either convicts or ex-convicts; or that, of the eleven, not one would inform on his fellows. Convicts’ hatred of Aborigines was a well-established tradition by then.

  In Chapter 4, we saw how the first conflicts between black and white in the colony began with the convicts, who stole the Aborigines’ weapons to sell as souvenirs, transgressed their territory while trying to escape and hated the blacks not only for their freedo
m but for the conciliatory treatment the officers, acting on instructions, gave them. If a convict stole a chicken, he would be flogged; if a tribesman did the same, he would go scot-free. Such things rankled, particularly as the blacks soon came to be seen as a wild extension of the jail of infinite space: To escape into the bush was to risk almost certain death from either starvation or the blacks’ waddies and spears. Thus the conviction grew among the convicts that the Aborigines, if not exactly in league with their hated jailers, were on their side; and this was confirmed when, in the penal stations of Newcastle and Moreton Bay in the 1820s, the guards took to rewarding Aborigines who captured escaped prisoners, beat them bloody and dragged them in. By the 1830s, the systematic use of blacktrackers—Aborigines who, at the behest of the hunting police, used their superb skills at following a man through the bush—had confirmed the convicts’ picture of the Aborigine as a skilled, treacherous enemy. If not an enemy, he was merely subhuman—a spindly nomadic wretch, Nature’s dull orphan. “The natiffs of this Country they are Blacks,” a typical convict description goes, “and they go naked just as they came into the world, and they live on Ruts of trees and snails or aney other Creeping thing, Women and Children goes all naked alike.”90 Every underdog needs a dog below him so he can feel canine. That, in the convicts’ eyes, was all the Aborigines were good for. The cruelty of the authorities toward whites was stored up as blind resentment in the convict lumpenproletariat, and discharged—though not always as efficiently as at Myall Creek and other sites of massacre—upon the blacks.

  For their part, the Aborigines seem to have despised the convicts, whom they saw laboring under conditions which their own pride would never have accepted, treated like the defeated members of some enemy tribe, as in a sense they were: driven, harried, kicked, flogged, scorned and occasionally killed. “No good—all same like croppy,” some tribesmen said when offered some left-over convict slops, “croppy” being the disdainful term for an Irish convict. In 1837 a missionary was surprised to find that Aborigines who had accepted a gift of winter dresses and cloaks painstakingly sewn from blankets had unpicked all the stitches and turned them back into blankets, because they thought them “Irish cloaks”—“our natives commonly attach some idea of inferiority to what is Irish and Ireland.”91

  Without records from the blacks’ side, one can only guess what the structure of the System contributed to their opinion of whites; but their behavior showed that if they were to take sides, however briefly or opportunistically, it might as well be with the esteemed warriors—the men in red coats who dispensed the power, the tobacco, the blankets. The idea that the despised black might have had some “natural” sympathy with the oppressed convict is the flimsiest sentiment. Across the cultural chasm that separated them, no such alliances were possible and none were ever made, except for a few escaped convicts who successfully “went native” and adapted to tribal life.92

  Convicts did not stop despising and fearing Aborigines after they had served out their sentences, received their pardons and become free men. On the contrary: Because “settled” land near the towns was always taken, the newly emancipated settler with little or no capital—and no government subsidies beyond a grant of raw bushland—was more likely to put up his slab hut on the very fringes of white occupation. This brought him and his family into contact with fresh tribal groups who would begin, all over again, the pattern of black resistance and “treachery,” answered by white retaliation and murder. In this way life on an expanding frontier ensured that convict attitudes toward Aborigines were carried and transmitted from generation to generation, from bond parents to free children. When one free farmer in the 1840s remonstrated with a hutkeeper—a former convict and soldier—for shooting an unarmed Aborigine, “he looked on me as a sort of dangerous lunatic for troubling myself about the lives of a few Blacks, which he evidently thought he had a perfect right to dispose of as he chose, so long as he did not get into trouble.” Let missionaries and city-dwellers prattle humanely about the blacks—they did not have to deal with them, or defend their huts and runs against them. They did not know how shiftless, feckless and dangerous they could be. In some parts of Australia, as any traveller can verify for himself, this attitude has never died.

  With convicts, the hatred was greater because the fear was more pervasive. An emigrant free settler was likely to have good weapons. An Emancipist, newly pardoned by the governor, might be able to get hold of an old musket or a rusty horse-pistol. More likely he would set off with nothing but cutlass and axe. Even with a gun, a man was at a disadvantage against Aborigines with spears, especially in close bush; he could not load and fire fast enough, and in any case few convicts had the kind of military training or sporting experience that would have turned them into good shots. And when the fire-sticks were clattering on the roof of the hut, and its slab walls began to smolder, there was no colonial cavalry to come galloping over the hill. The cavalry was a long way off—in America, in fact. Thus the typical form of frontier skirmish was ambush and small, indiscriminate massacre, along the lines of the atrocity at Myall Creek. Whites laid for blacks and shot them in the back. Blacks crept into the hut and crushed the skulls of a settler and his woman with their waddies. “The normal condition of inland life was an armed, watchful, wary, nervous calm,” slow in tempo but punctuated by sunny explosions of horror that soon settled again on the indifferent skin of the land.93

  Other factors helped worsen this long, bitter contact with men brutalized by the convict system. The remnants of aboriginal groups, their strength and numbers blasted away by the settlers’ guns, gave in to a marginal life as “station blacks” living on handouts and irregular work, like tracking stray cattle. Men who had sweated out years as assigned slave laborers were not averse to seeing blacks worse degraded. Ill from epidemic disease, blacks would sometimes “come in” to a settlement begging for medicine and be given sheep-drench, as befitted their animal status, and the crude veterinary medicines killed them. The one thing they could usually sell to Europeans was their women, and this led to debilitating outbreaks of venereal disease as well as further loosening of their vestigial tribal structure, through the birth of half-caste bastards. Missionaries often complained that the “lower-class whites”—former convicts and their descendants—deliberately undermined their efforts to educate and convert the fringe-dwelling Aborigines. Sewing-bees and Bible readings had no chance against rum and prostitution. And the politician who wanted to get and keep some popularity with the majority of white settlers had to deride government and missionary aid as the meddling of soft busybodies. Thus William Charles Wentworth, in bygone years the tribune of the ex-convicts but now widely known as “the lord of the lash and the triangle,” was reported as saying in a speech to the Australian Legislative Council in 1844:

  He could not see if the whites in this colony were to go out into the land and possess it, that the Government had much to do with them. No doubt there would be battles between the settlers and the border tribes; but they might be settled without the aid of the Government. The civilized people had come in and the savage must go back. They must go on progressing until their dominancy was established, and therefore he could think that no measure was wise or merciful to the blacks which clothed them with a degree of seeming protection, which their position would not allow them to maintain.… It was not the policy of a wise Government to attempt the perpetuation of the aboriginal race of New South Wales.… They must give way before the arms, aye! even the diseases of civilized nations—they must give way before they attain the power of those nations.94

  For the original Australians, then, the arrival of the convicts was a catastrophe. Perhaps they might have suffered less if New South Wales had been colonized by free emigrants who were, at least notionally, less brutal; who had a less obvious investment in kicking a subject class. The more opportunistic the settlers were, the more their sense of being poor white trash demanded relief, the more they spoke of civilization and racial superiority,
reflecting that even their diseases facilitated Destiny’s plan for the blacks. It was a thin, embittered comfort; but it was one of very few the System offered its white subjects, at the end of their own deracination.

  9

  The Government Stroke

  i

  NOBODY ON SHORE in Sydney was blasé about the arrival of a convict transport. For the people who crammed the bobbing flotilla of rowboats around the ship as she warped in, it meant news from home or even the glimpse of a familiar face, pallid from life below the hatches. But for the settlers, it meant a small gush of the most precious commodity in Australia: labor. Every convict faced the same social prospects. He or she served the Crown or, on the Crown’s behalf, some private person, for a given span of years. Then came a pardon or a ticket-of-leave, either of which permitted him to sell his labor freely and choose his place of work. What this came down to, in the common view of English critics of transportation—most of whom had not been to Australia and had no first-hand knowledge of the convict system—was that the Crown used them as slaves until they were judged fit to become peasants.